W H A T ’ S N E W

A detailed, ongoing study of California’s flawed “Good Neighbor Fence Act of 2013” (Assembly Bill 1404 or AB 1404), under which Californians have lost founding rights of property & privacy. Includes:•a 2nd-window aside introducing radical 17th-century republican proposals for restoring the integrity of the law, with related extract from The Law of Freedom in a Platform: or, True Magistracy Restored (1652), by the Digger leader, Gerrard Winstanley•a 2nd-window aside introducing radical Counter-Reformation thinking about justice and law reform, with related extract from Giovanni Botero’s ethical Christian alternative to Machiavellian statecraft, Della Ragion di Stato Libri Dieci (Venice, 1589; rev. 1598)•a 2nd-window aside with an HTML transcript of a book review (“Putting Land and Power Back into Economics”) by Polly Cleveland, from the Nov./Dec. 2017 issue of Dollars & Sense; Cleveland’s review delves into the new land-tax movement, which promises “to revitalize not only urban economics, but our whole approach to economics — micro, macro and muddled”• a new 2nd-window aside (as of 2/16/2019) on the climatic scent of proprietary New York and New Jersey, relaying little-known traveler’s tales from the 17th and 19th centuries• text of this nation’s first gun-control laws, passed in 1686 and 1694 in the most “rebellious” of the Anglo-American colonies (East New Jersey)• new content (as of 1/21/2019) about Sam Chang’s innovative proposal to bring “negative voting” — whereby voters have the option to vote against a candidate — to California, as part of a global democratic reform effort; see webpage’s sidebar entry on “the negative vote” project for some introductory comment• two new subsections (click/tap here for #1 and here for #2) added on 12/15/2018 to the section on Fake Representation, which I define as: pretending to put constituents’ interests front & center while, in reality, pursuing a factional legislative agenda which is more about getting & holding on to power than it is about pursuing the greatest public good.

NOTE: one or more files in this suite of Web pages most recently revised: 2/21/2019.

Pictures of the Vetruvian Woman, from William Austin’s geometrical study of the divinely-proportioned female form in Haec Homo, wherein the Excellency of the Creation of Woman Is Described (1637).
Austin’s protofeminist essay was dedicated to the Vitruvian Woman’s real-life counterpart, Mary Griffith, horologist and early bourgeois patron of the arts & sciences, whose portrait is also reproduced here.

Having trouble getting some of the underlined text links on this page to work?
The latest problem with Google Chrome’s display of this website is documented in the updated section, “A Note about this Website’s Use of Hover Boxes.” As of April 2018, neither Google Chrome nor Opera can properly display She-philosopher.​com hover notes on desktop/laptop/netbook computers. (Alternatively, to view all of this Web page’s hover notes in a second-window aside — where they are clustered together like end-notes — click/tap here.)
Adding insult to injury, as of 2015, Google Search began penalizing She-philosopher.com for my contrarian design philosophy & strategies. Google’s newest technocentric model of peer review rates scholarly content based on commercially-driven criteria, such as mobile-friendly design, rather than intellectual merit.

An IN BRIEF topic on the “Sect of antient Philosophers” known as Pythagoreans.
FWIW, I long ago identified the figure I believe to be the true Pythagoras in Rafael’s celebrated fresco, The School of Athens (c.1509–11).
But my (as far as I know, unique & somewhat surprising) identification relies on little-known, 17th-century sources & texts which I have not yet finished digitizing for publication here. Without this new evidence at hand, which everyone is able to review for themselves, I can’t make a proper — able to withstand the rigors of peer review in today’s digital respublica literaria — scholarly argument.
So further public announcements on this matter are going to have to wait, as I attend to other, more time-critical projects first.

A new biography of “Mr. Tho. Britton, Smallcoal-Man,” who owned 3 works by Margaret Cavendish (in addition to works by Mary Trye, Anna Maria van Schurman, Bathsua Makin, and Elizabeth Cellier) in the IN BRIEF section.

I’m in the throes of updating the old introductory essay on “Mad Madge” in the PLAYERS section. As part of this process, I have recently converted a companion webessay on the politics of naming Margaret Cavendish into an In Brief topic, available here.

For those (like me!) who wish they were more fluent readers & speakers of Latin, there is hope: see the article by Anthony Grafton in the 16 Feb. 2015 issue (vol. 300, no. 7, pp. 27–31) of The Nation: “Latin Lives: Is the revival of a dead language breathing new life into the humanities?”
Grafton writes here about the inspirational Paideia Institute: “a nonprofit organization created by two young scholars named Jason Pedicone and Eric Hewett. In classical Greek, paideia means education or upbringing — more properly the ideal method of education, which sought to form the mind, character and body of the young men who would serve their cities as active citizens and soldiers. This concept has grown and changed over time, as it was adopted, and adapted, by ancient Christians and modern humanists, and it still inspires Pedicone and Hewett — reformulated in a special, newly inclusive way. A few years ago, they and some equally committed colleagues started bringing high school and college students, and a few graduate students, to Rome, where they spend some weeks studying Latin. Summer study, a dead language, hours traveling on buses: it doesn’t sound exciting on the face of it, especially to anyone who knows how little studying takes place in many summer programs. But these summer experiences are different. A lot of Paideians come back in love — with something bigger than they’re used to, something bigger than what we usually offer them in schools and universities, and that love makes a huge difference in everything they do.” (A. Grafton, 27)

+

And see the youth-oriented IMHO feature for the PBS NewsHour by Frankie Thomas, “Why Learning Latin Stays with You Forever” (originally aired 4/9/2018). Her spirited appeal, retitled “Study Latin if you want to talk like a supervillain” for supplementary posting in the website’s IMHO section, stresses Latin’s value as middle-school entertainment, and while some commentators criticized her presentation for this (“amateurish” opining geared at engaging “with kids who enjoy movies like Ghost World or maybe TV Shows like The Big Bang Theory”), I wish I’d been privy to her unique point of view when I was that age!
After all, the time-honored principle of dulce et utile (studies that are both entertaining and instructive) applies here, as well as to Horace’s Ars Poetica, and to the acquisition of “useful and entertaining Knowledge” in all the arts & sciences (e.g., from the title-page for the Supplement [1744] to John Harris’ Lexicon Technicum: or, an Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: Explaining not only the Terms of Art, but the Arts Themselves [1704–10] — an encyclopedia intended for the “Benefit and Satisfaction” of readers, compiled “By a Society of GENTLEMEN. Utile dulci.”).

For more on the visual rhetoric of the title-pages for the 1753 Supplement to Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, by George Lewis Scott, et al., see Lib. Cat. No. CYCL1728h (Part 2).

N O T E

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** home page of She-philosopher.com:
a Web-based research project for science & technology studies,
focused on “the long 17th century” (roughly 1575–1725) **

First Published: April 2004Revised (substantive): 21 February 2019

I have been working on the new and improved She-philosopher.com since 2012, when I created a beta test site for the transitional website at She-philosopher.org. Back then, I thought it was important that the original she-philosopher.com remain intact throughout the development process, and that I keep my remodeling mess out of the public eye, and off-limits to external, commercial search engines. As soon as the transitional website at She-philosopher.org was more presentable, I planned to move it over to its proper .com domain, replacing the original she-philosopher.com website which launched in 2004 and has been showing its age for some time.

I did not anticipate in 2012 that the remodeling process would take 4 years — and counting! — nor did I foresee that my standard for presentable scholarship (driven by traditional print-based publication models for academic content) would end up at odds with my creative process as a Web publisher of original, postdoctoral scholarly research.

Back then, I didn't undertand how much the online medium would shape the message.

I know better now. The new capabilities of Web publication enhance the communication process more than the product, so seeking any sort of finality is a wrong-headed goal. Even scholarly content is fungible with this medium, and to try to fix it in discrete, closed communications is to defy the online order of things, and ensure that the new and improved She-philosopher.com never emerges from beta test.

I’ve thus had another change of heart. As of July 2016, I decided to launch the new and improved She-philosopher.com as is, allowing all and sundry — including external search engines — full access, so that everyone can follow the development process and preview new content as it’s posted and being tested.

Please remember while you do so that this transitional website is very much a work-in-progress. It is normal for links to be broken once in a while; for references to be missing; for our local search engine index to be updated only when I post important new content (instead of every time I correct a typo); for navigation between old & new website pages to be clumsy, especially as I reorganize some content; for pages to sometimes contain placeholder text (“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet ...”); and so on. I ask for your patience while I wend my way through this complicated redevelopment phase, with no end in sight.

As always, several research projects I’m trying to finish up have expanded well beyond their original scope, and are introducing further delays. To those of you waiting patiently for all the new content relating to claims by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1st edn., 1976)

3. Dating the development of consciousness to around the end of the second millennium B.C. in Greece and Mesopotamia. The transition occurred at different times in other parts of the world.

it’s still coming, I promise. I shall be adding 16 new digital editions to the She-philosopher.com library — writings by Ovid, Francis Bacon, and Robert Hooke, along with published articles by other 17th-century English and Italian naturalists — as part of this project. That’s a lot of primary source material to organize and prepare, so it’s going to take me longer than I initially planned to get everything done.

But ultimately, the main reason redevelopment takes so long is because the research activity itself — richly layered with countless detours and distractions — can not be hurried along. I was recently reminded of this when I added a brief note about 17th-century druggists to an essay at a different website. There, my desire for scholarly precision too often ends up delaying the publication of time-sensitive material, preventing me from taking full advantage of yet another kairic moment. At the time, I was in a hurry to identify which

Bartholin complains of the too great number of Apothecaries in Denmark; tho’ there were but three in Copenhagen, and four in all the Kingdom beside: What would he have said of London, where there are upwards of 1300?

As Wikipedia summarizes, “Three generations of the Bartholin family made significant contributions to anatomical science and medicine in the 17th and 18th centuries”: Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680); his father, Caspar Bartholin the Elder (1585–1629); his brother, Rasmus Bartholin (1625–1698); and his son, Caspar Bartholin the Younger (1655–1738). Between them, the four Bartholins published over 20 works, all in Baroque Latin, totaling thousands of pages. It could easily take me several months to locate copies of, and read through, all of this material before finding the original source for Chambers’ claim. Unable to devote so much time to this one research project, when I’m already juggling dozens of others, I chose to spend several days on it instead, before I traded in the pedant for the rhetor, and made an educated guess about which Bartholin — Caspar the Elder, or Thomas, or Rasmus, or Caspar the Younger — had commented on the number of Danish druggists at some point during the 17th century.

In the end, I settled on Thomas, based on my interpretation of the variety of Bartholin citations elsewhere in Chambers’ two-volume Cyclopaedia. But I could well be proven wrong in this hasty identification, which is a chance I would not take here at She-philosopher.com, where accuracy is paramount, and the historical detail rules. That doesn’t mean there are no mistakes at She-philosopher.com; alas, there are probably plenty, as with much historical research of this nature. But I never knowingly finesse the truth here, for purposes of kairos or expediency.

So, as you read through the content on display at the new She-philosopher.com, bear in mind that even a seemingly simple, tweet-length phrase — “... the eminent Danish physician and natural philosopher, Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680), had complained ...” — can take many months to fact-check properly.

The new She-philosopher.com is a concatenation of many such phrases ... which is how months turn into years, and I’m still working on the beta-release version of a transitional website....

A note about donating to She-philosopher.com: There is a new TLS/SSL-secured Support Us page for this purpose (see the navigation bar at top & bottom of this page), which is properly secured for commercial transactions using the HTTPS secure protocol. As you make use of She-philosopher.​com and its unique resources, please consider contributing to this website’s maintenance & further development with a small financial donation. She-philosopher.​com is visitor-supported, and independent of large foundation money and corporate/state sponsorship.
Keeping high-quality, independent scholarship on the Web is a worthy, but underfunded, cause. So if you do decide to make She-philosopher.​com one of your philanthropic priorities — yes, philanthropy knows no income bracket (it is the act of donating, rather than the amount given, that makes you a philanthropist ;-) — you have my heartfelt thanks!

^Title-page ornament from the 1753 Supplement to Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, by George Lewis Scott, et al.
The design is an 18th-century twist on the Hermathena of Antiquity, a statue juxtaposing the sibling gods, Hermes and Athena. Traditional iconography has the statues of Mercury and Minerva raised on square pedestals and joined as one, the resulting hybrid deity serving as a symbol for the Ciceronian union of wisdom and eloquence (Wisdom restrains Eloquence, and Eloquence tempers Wisdom).
A Hermathena was chosen by Cicero (106–43 BCE) to ornament his lecture hall, and has been a traditional symbol of academies and scholarship ever since. For example, the Bolognese academic, Achille Bocchi (1488-1562), also used a Hermathena as the device (impresa) for his own school. His Hermes and Athena each had a columnlike base and upper torso on the corner of the façade for the Palazzo Bocchi; the two stone gods linked arms, and between them Eros reined the mouth of a lion's head. (E. S. Watson, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form, 76)

This website was moved on 3/11/2018 to a new Web hosting service, capable of displaying it properly (as of 3/15/2018, we’re fully functional again).

N O T E : I wish to take this opportunity to warn other serious Web designers away from IX Web Hosting (newly rebranded as Site5 Web Hosting). They hosted She-philosopher.com since 2009, and although there were recently some long periods of downtime, nothing prepared me for the mysterious malfunction that occurred on 2/28/2018 when they were no longer able to serve up any of this website’s images to visitors, no longer able to fix their technical glitches (blaming my code instead), and no longer able to provide even the most basic customer support (e.g., as of 3/15/2018, two tickets opened on 3/1/2018 and 3/5/2018, had languished without even an automated response for 14 days and 10 days, respectively). And when they finally did get around to troubleshooting things, they made permanent unauthorized filename changes to an unknown number of my graphics files, without telling me which file names they changed, so that I am still (as of 5/1/2018) discovering & dealing with errors that IX Web Hosting/Site5 introduced to these pages.

The contrast with my new Web hosting service, Namecheap (which offers superior technical capabilities and customer service at affordable rates), couldn’t be starker!

... And here’s where I give a special shout-out for Vlad Mozolev (also Dmitriy Kovtun, Eugene Mitrofanov, and Serge Shaboltas) who went above & beyond to help me get this website performing — beyond expectation! — on the Namecheap server.

In addition, Daria Zolotko (a willing and able partner, who saw me through a stressful period with grace and enthusiasm), plus Mikhail Ermakov, Anastasia Tereschuk, Maria Polischuk, Maria Prytkina, and multiple others on the Hosting CS tech support team have all provided a level of customer service that is truly extraordinary!

So, a special thank you to my expanding tech-support dream team at Namecheap. It has been a pleasure working with all of you on this challenging project, and I look forward to many years of fruitful collaboration with Namecheap in the future.

If you have learned — or otherwise benefited — from this Web page, consider making
a donation to She-philosopher.com. Even a small investment in the future of high-quality
e-scholarship — such as a contribution of USD $1 — will make a big difference!

I have been working on — “I” being Deborah Taylor-Pearce, founder, publisher & editor of She-philosopher.​com, first launched in April 2004 before the advent of Google and other Big Search tools for the Web. In the beginning, visitors to She-philosopher.​com came because of my posts to various listservs and Usenet newsgroups, or because I had invited them by passing out URLs, or because of word-of-mouth. In other words, they either knew me or knew of me before visiting.
Having been at this for so long now, I tend to forget that not everyone who will land on this page in 2017 (or later) knows my identity. Moreover, I have less of an online presence now that I am no longer active in discussion forums (other than an occasional post to GitHub or other tech-support hang-outs), having chosen not to make the move to such popular social networks as Facebook and Twitter.
In March 2017, I was told by a new visitor to this website that it “comes across as a bit odd” to alight on this home page and be addressed by an anonymous she-philosopher who never introduces herself. Longship Captain Fred Blonder is right about that, and this note is intended to correct that oddity. Thank you, Fred, for the constructive criticism! ::

I settled on Thomas — Thomas Bartholin (1616–1680).
I have reason to think that Chambers’ source for the mid-17th-century complaint about the growing number of Danish druggists competing with physicians for market share, professional status, and perquisites, was Bartholin’s Cista medica Hafniensis, variis consiliis, curationibus, casibus rarioribus, vitis medicorum Hafniensium ... Accedit ... Domus anatomica brevissime descripta (Copenhagen: Matthias Godicchenius, 1662), but I do not presently have the time or resources to verify this scholarly intuition. ::